Noteworthy changes 1 January – 17 January 2010

GNOME has been upgraded to the new development release 2.29.5. The Cheese webcam application has been split into different libraries, making it easier for other applications to integrate webcam functionality (like avatar choosers in instant messaging applications). Epiphany now uses an infobar to ask the user for saving website username and password and stores them in the GNOME keyring. Thanks to the new Content-Encoding support in Libsoup and Webkitgtk, Epiphany is now capable of correctly rendering web pages which send GZIP compressed pages.

There is a package available in Cooker now for the QBittorrent BitTorrent client.

xine-lib 1.2 with support for VDPAU for hardware accelerated rendering of high definition video is now available.

dracut, a replacement for mkinitrd, is already available for some time in Mandriva. The last few weeks many changes were made to make it work nicely in Mandriva out of the box. You can create a new initrd with dracut by hand if you want, or start using it by default the next time you install a new kernel by running

# update-alternatives --config mkinitrd

Ruby 1.9.1 is now available in Contrib. This new version is much more faster than the previous Ruby 1.8 series

USB/IP, a tool for using USB devices over the network, is now packaged in Cooker.